788 wolfgang wolters
Farnese in 1554 casts a spotlight on a private level of meaning in regard to
some of these nudi. to what extent the literary deliberations on the roles
and the self-conception of the sexes were reflected in paintings remains
a subject of further study.
the decoration of the home with pictures, sculptures, innumerable
small bronzes that still exist today, or objects of various natures and
provenances, including weapons and trophies, delighted the owners and
impressed visitors. the spectrum extended from cabinets of curiosities
to extensive art collections. Andrea Odoni or Gabriele Vendramin pos-
sessed now world-renowned pictures like Giorgione’s Tempest (Gallerie
dell’Accademia). it appears that collectors especially prized themes such
as landscapes, pastorals, and encoded allegories and histories, the latter
illustrating or alluding to authors of antiquity. the history of Venetian art
collections is also the history of paintings and, only more rarely, of sculp-
tures, which were prized above all for their artistic quality and thus also
for the prominence of the artist. even at that time, more than a few paint-
ings were most probably incomprehensible without clarification by a well-
informed master of the house; today, many paintings are to be found in
romping-grounds of the highly specialized research for meaning—surely
Giorgione’s Tempest (Galleria dell’Accademia) deserves the place of honor
in this regard. the thought that the paintings may have been calculated
to be impossible to decipher is too modern a perspective.
Beyond the private palace, or the seat of the government or the admin-
istration, members of Venetian families could be present on altarpieces,
tombs, church façades, and in pictures in the scuole (in the Scuole Grandi
as well as the Scuole Piccole). Furthermore, the monuments on the
façades of Venetian churches were not reserved for military command-
ers alone. in 1553, tommaso rangone, a scholar and patron who was as
recognized as he was egocentric, had himself portrayed in bronze, sitting
in his study, on the façade of S. Giuliano. Previously, rangone’s request to
erect a statue with his portrait on the façade of S. Geminiano on St Mark’s
Square, directly across from S. Marco, had been rejected. rangone was
not the only one with demands that conflicted with Venice’s conventions.
cardinal Giambattista Zen had already bequeathed an opulent endow-
ment to the republic, together with the stipulation that he be entombed
“in” S. Marco. His burial chapel was built in the portico—which in the
liturgical sense was not “in” the church yet was still at an entrance rich
in tradition, the Porta da Mar—which demonstrates how such a clause
could be bypassed without sacrifice to the national coffers. there had
previously been a similar case with Bartolomeo colleoni, a condottiere in